Tag Archives: Martin Cooper

The Cell Phone: Marty Cooper’s Big Idea May 23, 2010 4:59 PM

Hear the story of the invention of the cell phone from the man whose team came up with it at Motorola. The inventor, Martin Cooper, is still at it, improving the gadget he came up with 37 years ago. Morley Safer reports.

Marty Cooper, the pioneer of mobile telephony, has spent his entire career pushing wireless communications to new heights UNLESS you work in the telecoms industry, you are unlikely to have heard of Marty Cooper. He is hardly a household name. But his influence has been felt across the world, because he is the engineer who took the cellular technology used in the carphones of the 1970s and decided that phones ought to be small enough to be portable. His determination led to the first prototype, in 1973, and then to the first commercial mobile phone in 1983. “Marty is the most influential person no one has ever heard of,” says Robert McDowell, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, America’s telecoms regulator. http://www.economist.com/node/13725793?story_id=13725793

People are mobile! They are naturally, inherently mobile. You see that every time you drive the streets of the District and the beltway. It seems that few people are where they want to be and they all seem to be on their way to somewhere else. And yet we in the telecommunications business have a history of constraining this need for mobility. We started by chaining people to their homes and desks with copper wire, then we introduced wireless but trapped them in their cars, and now that personal cellular telephony is a reality, we offer mobility for their computers but then give them a high cost, slow, ubiquitous service or the constraint of a WiFi ‘‘hot spot’’ that lengthens the chains but hardly eliminates them. Effective personal telecommunications should deliver ubiquitous, reliable, ever-increasing bandwidth to individuals at ever-decreasing cost. There is no technological or economic reason that keeps us from doing just that but we in the telecommunications industry are far from fulfilling this need; and at the top of the list of excuses for our painfully slow progress is the radio frequency spectrum.